Abstract

It is no doubt well known that a certain passage from The Concept of Anxiety has left an enigmatic impression on the various editors’ and readers’ responses to what is considered Kierkegaard’s most difficult work. While discussing the concept of innocence and its difference from immediacy, Kierkegaard states: "Innocence is a quality, it is a state that may very well endure, and therefore the logical haste to have it annulled is meaningless, whereas in logic it should try to hurry a little more, for in logic it always comes too late, even when it hurries". As might already be apparent, the focused-on ambiguity or indeterminacy in this passage revolves precisely around the referential role of the it. 2 Ironically, the editor’s attending footnote to this passage, while seeming to clarify matters somewhat, only adds superfluous ambiguity. He starts out by noting that the general editors of Kierkegaard’s work have proposed that it refers to "immediacy" rather than "innocence," only to resort to yet another external source in pointing out the error of their logic. The presumptive clarification, at best, makes things more confusing. However, rather than attempting to clarify or remedy Kierkegaard’s enigmatic pronouncement, perhaps one should anxiously heed such an ambiguity as a textual marker of Kierkegaard’s conception. In other words, the enigmatic quality of the it as such may be more telling for a reading of Kierkegaard’s text than the concealing-effect produced by any attempt to avoid textual uncertainty. For, if we attempt to unpack any uncertainty by making it refer to something, whether it be "immediacy," "innocence," or any other signified, we might, in the end, wind up avoiding the anxiety and the possibility that the enigmatic offers by providing the guarantee that conceptualization provides, a privileging that Kierkegaard’s text implicitly warns against.